TRIBUNNEWS.COM - Sekitar satu dasawarsa yang lalu, SpongeBob SquarePants dan Bikinin Bottom-nya mulai mencuri perhatian khalayak.
Kabarnya, penghasilan SpongeBobs di seluruh dunia pada 2016 saja mencapai 140 juta dolar AS (lebih dari Rp2 triliun) dan merupakan adaptasi animasi film terlaris kelima yang pernah ada.
Para pencinta serial SpongeBob baru saja berduka cita. Stephen Hillenburg, sang pencipta, meninggal dunia di usia 57 tahun pada Selasa (27/11) di Amerika.
Hillenburg berlatar belakang pendidikan perencanaan sumber daya alam dengan fokus sumber daya laut.
Predikat itu pernah dia gunakan untuk mengajar Biologi Kelautan di Orange County Marine Institute. Tapi, Hillenburg juga suka menggambar.
Ia pernah menciptakan buku komik yang disebut Intertidial Zone—yang disebut sebagai versi awal SpongeBob.
Ketika dia bekerja sebagai direktur kreatif untuk serial animasi Nickelodeon, Rocko’s Modern Life, teman-temannya sesama animator melihat potensinya yang besar.
KOMPAS.com - Kreator Spongebob SquarePants, Stephen Hillenburg , meninggal dunia pada usia 57 tahun. Kematian Hillenburg diumumkan oleh Nickelodeon, Selasa (27/11/2018). Stephen Hillenburg mengembuskan napas terakhir pada Senin (26/11/2018). Menurut orang-orang terdekatnya, ia menderita ALS atau yang juga dikenal sebagai penyakit Lou Gehrig. "Dia teman yang penyayang dan partner kreatif bagi setiap orang di Nicklelodeon. Doa kami untuk keluarganya," kata Nickelodeon. "Steve menciptakan Spongebob SquarePants dengan selera humor yang unik dan kepolosan yang memberi kebahagiaan bagi anak-anak dan keluarga di mana pun," lanjut jaringan televisi tersebut. Stephen Hillenburg, yang berlatar belakang guru biologi, meluncurkan sosok kartun yang dicintai anak-anak itu di Nicklelodeon pada 1999. Kartun itu bercerita tentang petualangan spons kuning dan teman-temannya yang hidup di Bikini Bottom di kedalaman Samudera Pasifik. "Karakter-karakter karyanya yang sangat original itu dan jagat Bikini Bottom akan terus hidup untuk mengingatkan kita pada nilai-nilai optimisme, persahabatan, dan imajinasi yang tanpa batas," kata Nickelodeon. Dari layar televisi, cerita Spongebob SquarePants diadaptasi ke layar lebar pada 2014. Film ini melibatkan artis peran papan atas seperti Scarlett Johansson dan Alec Baldwin.
Baca juga: Hoaks Kartun SpongeBob Tamat Viral di Twitter
The creator of SpongeBob SquarePants, who has died aged 57, channelled the surrealism of 90s animation and his own childlike zest for life into a show that brought joy to millions
There are few creative acts that strike me again and again with such joy as SpongeBob SquarePants. Grinning out from a child’s backpack, or his goofy features cast in milk and sugar and stuck on a lolly stick, the cartoon character is so ubiquitous as to almost become unremarkable. But like all truly great art, its power renews itself: wait, yes, that really is a sponge, with arms and legs and a face, wearing short trousers and a shirt and tie and shiny black boots, and he wants to be everyone’s friend.
SpongeBob SquarePants creator Stephen Hillenburg dies at 57 Read more
The rediscovery is a jolt of sheer delight. The very fact SpongeBob exists at all feels almost like proof of the existence of God: the inspiration needed for something of such pure originality has to be divine.
Wherever the inspiration came from, it was made sponge by Stephen Hillenburg, the character’s creator who has died tragically young at 57 years old of motor neurone disease. Across 242 episodes, two movies (plus a third incoming), a Broadway musical, thousands of memes and your kid’s lunchbox, his creation has become a cultural titan.
Hillenburg, who I was fortunate enough to interview in 2016, was nuts about life under the sea ever since a childhood reared on scuba diving and Jacques Cousteau. He was essentially a failed marine biologist who went into cartooning because he was better at it, working first on the Nickelodeon show Rocko’s Modern Life. This was just one of the surrealistic, deadpan cartoons that populated 1990s American TV, a countercultural strain that SpongeBob was synthesised from and Hillenburg perfected.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Child-like ... Stephen Hillenburg. Photograph: Anacleto Rapping/Getty Images
There are echoes of the Ernst-like plasticity of Ren & Stimpy and the pop art brashness of Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, with just the occasional parent-facing deadpan gag, the kind that peppered Rugrats, Dexter’s Laboratory and later, the Shrek movies. But brilliant as these creations often are, none had the radical naivety of SpongeBob – it was his eternal, reflexive positivity, gifted to him by Hillenburg, that made him truly exceptional.
As Tom Kenny, the voice of SpongeBob, told me, the show has “comedic archetypes that have worked for hundreds of years, further back than Shakespeare”. Hillenburg stripped our world back to literal cartoon versions of human behaviour. SpongeBob is the idealist, met with both cynicism (Squidward, Plankton and Mr Krabs, a triptych of venality) and chaos (best friend Patrick, a starfish of pure id). Off they go for 11 minutes at time, the oppositional energies colliding. It usually goes badly for SpongeBob to begin with, those eyes suddenly massive and brimming – but in the end he triumphs, often thanks to errors the others make due to their self-interest or negativity. So often children are told merely to “be yourself”, but what if that self is corrupted? SpongeBob evolves the message: fill your heart with kindness and then be yourself. The world will bend to you without you trying.
It’s this purity of intent that makes SpongeBob so globally popular, and such an absorbent medium for online memes. Hop on Twitter or Instagram and you are never far from an “evil Patrick”, used to illustrate amusing misdeeds, or SpongeBob himself, looking relieved, angry, stoned or indeed any other human mood. The memes work because we both see ourselves in SpongeBob and aspire to be him. He is flawed, vulnerable but endearing, while being quietly, mutably omnipotent.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Flawed, vulnerable but endearing ... Spongebob rejoices at the start of another day. Photograph: Allstar/NICKELODEON/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar
When I spoke to Hillenburg, I expected big energy, someone yakking like SpongeBob himself. But there was something careful and truly child-like about him: it was clear that SpongeBob’s very naivety was an extension of his personality. He was as reflexively, unwittingly comic as SpongeBob, too: “SpongeBob is just made of cellulose, but he has parents who are natural sponges – he got the square gene,” he told me straight. His description of the original pitch he made to Nickelodeon, meanwhile, is the kind of pitch SpongeBob would make for a show about himself:
When I pitched the show, I made this special seashell. You could pick it up and hear me singing: “Spongeboy, Spongeboy!” I also made an aquarium with Patrick planted on the side, SpongeBob sitting on a barrel and Squidward inside. I wore a Hawaiian shirt. I don’t know what they thought of it. Eventually we pitched with a storyboard. The executive, Albie Hecht, walked out – then walked straight back in and said: “Let’s make this.”
Thank God he did. SpongeBob has evolved into a paragon of hard work, tenacity and moral fibre; with his job as a short-order chef, he is one of the few working class heroes on US television; his friendship with Patrick is movingly pure. As Kenny told me: “Twentysomethings thank me for their childhood … SpongeBob lives at the bottom of the sea, but he brings a lot of great stuff to the surface.”
Hillenburg had wanted to call SpongeBob “Spongeboy”, but was foiled by a mop company. “I eventually thought of SpongeBob, but he needed a last name – SquarePants came to mind,” he said, with perfect blitheness, as if the name was as workaday as Smith or Jones. It was a reminder that true artistic genius is never aware of itself. Hillenburg has died too young, but his legacy as a loud surrealist and quiet moralist is unique, and shows that he lived as we all should: like a bright, confident sponge.
Los Angeles — Stephen Hillenburg, who used his dual loves of drawing and marine biology to spawn the absurd undersea world of SpongeBob SquarePants, has died, Nickelodeon announced on Tuesday.
Hillenburg died on Monday of Lou Gehrig's disease, also known as ALS, the cable network said in a statement. He was 57.
He had announced he had the disease in March 2017. His death comes just weeks after the death of another cartoon hero in Marvel creator Stan Lee.
Hillenburg conceived, wrote, produced and directed the animated series that began in 1999 and bloomed into hundreds of episodes, movies and a Broadway show.
The absurdly jolly SpongeBob and his yell-along theme song that opened "Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?!" quickly appealed to college kids and parents as much as it did kids.
"The fact that it's undersea and isolated from our world helps the characters maintain their own culture," Hillenburg told The Associated Press in 2001. "The essence of the show is that SpongeBob is an innocent in a world of jaded characters. The rest is absurd packaging."
Its vast cast of oceanic creatures included SpongeBob's starfish sidekick Patrick, his tightwad boss Mr. Krabs, squirrel pal Sandy Cheeks and always-exasperated neighbour Squidward Tentacles.
While Hillenburg introduced and popularised exotic creatures like the sea sponge (which in the real world is not square,) Bikini Bottom was a realm like no other, real or fictional. SpongeBob can play his nose like a flute and could not possibly be happier to work his fast-seafood job of flipping Krabby Patties.
But he has his troubles, too. He constantly fails his boat-driving test, forcing his frightened blowfish teacher to inflate. In one episode he suffers a broken butt and is afraid to leave his pineapple home for days.
"I don't want to face my fears," SpongeBob, voiced by Tom Kenny, says in another episode. "I'm afraid of them!"
Born at his father's army post in Lawton, Oklahoma, Hillenburg graduated from Humboldt State University in California in 1984 with a degree in natural resource planning with an emphasis on marine resources, and went on to teach marine biology at the Orange County Marine Institute.
While there he drew a comic, The Intertidal Zone, that he used as a teaching tool. It featured anthropomorphic ocean creatures that were precursors to the characters on SpongeBob.
Hillenburg shifted to drawing and earned a master of fine arts degree in animation from the California Institute of the Arts in 1992.
That same year he created an animated short called Wormholes that won festival plaudits and helped land him a job on the Nickelodeon show Rocko's Modern Life, where he worked from 1993 to 1996 before he began to build SpongeBob's undersea world of Bikini Bottom, which showed off his knowledge of marine life and willingness to throw all the details out the window.
"We know that fish don't walk," he told the AP, "and that there is no organised community with roads, where cars are really boats. And if you know much about sponges, you know that living sponges aren't square."
The show was an immediate hit that has lost no momentum in the nearly 20 years since its creation and helped define the culture of Nickelodeon.
"He was a beloved friend and long-time creative partner to everyone at Nickelodeon, and our hearts go out to his entire family," Nickelodeon's statement said. "His utterly original characters and the world of Bikini Bottom will long stand as a reminder of the value of optimism, friendship and the limitless power of imagination."
TV, THE BIG SCREEN AND THE STAGE
Its nearly 250 episodes have won four Emmy Awards and 15 Kids' Choice Awards, and led to an endless line of merchandise to rival any other pop cultural phenomenon of the 2000s.
"When you set out to do a show about a sponge, you can't anticipate this kind of craze," Hillenburg told the AP in 2002.
In 2004, the show shifted to the big screen with The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie and a 2015 sequel, The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water.
Intensely involved in every aspect of the show initially, Hillenburg after the 2004 film stepped back into an executive producer role on the show, where he remained for the rest of his life.
A musical stage adaptation bowed on Broadway in 2017, with music from such stars as Steven Tyler, Sara Bareilles and John Legend. It earned 12 Tony Award nominations, including one for best performance by a leading actor for Ethan Slater.
"I am heartbroken to hear of the passing of Stephen Hillenburg," Slater said in an email on Tuesday. "Through working on SpongeBob, I got to know him not only as a creative genius, but as a truly generous and kind person. He warmly embraced us on Broadway as the newest members of his wonderful SpongeBob family, and made it so clear from the get-go why he is so beloved: Genuine kindness."
Hillenburg is survived by his wife of 20 years Karen Hillenburg, son Clay, mother Nancy Hillenburg, and a brother, Brian Kelly Hillenburg.
